Dec 4, 2025Confirmed
Perplexity AI Reportedly Accused in Federal Lawsuit of Purported Copyright Infringement and False Attribution of Chicago Tribune Content
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData exfiltrationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
The Chicago Tribune filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Perplexity AI unlawfully reproduced and paraphrased its copyrighted journalism in generative chatbot and search outputs. The complaint claims the AI system produced substitutive answers that bypassed links to the Tribune's website, diverted revenue, and at times hallucinated inaccurate information falsely attributed to the newspaper.
What this means for youFor people who get news from AI search tools, answers can reuse publishers' work and sometimes misattribute claims, so check the original article before trusting or sharing an AI summary. For businesses and publishers, this shows how AI answers can divert readers and revenue away from source sites. For government, it is a live test of how copyright law applies to AI answer engines.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1298
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 1951. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify